You know how it is – a wardrobe full of clothes but nothing to wear? Or indeed a city full of people but no-one to meet up with? Young, French entrepreneur Fiona Disegni has come up with a solution to both. Her start-up business Rentez-Vous allows people to rent out their clothes, access other people’s wardrobes, and meet like-minded individuals. Part of the collaborative consumption movement, Disegni describes Rentez-Vous as “the Airbnb of fashion” and believes it could revolutionise the way people view clothes and shopping for them.

Disegni certainly has the background for it. Her dissertation at the Institut d’études politiques in Rennes was in collaborative consumption. Fashion and marketing internships then followed at Burberry, JWT and Asos, before she dedicated herself to Rentez-Vous full-time last year.

“I started with a small event in a flat in Paris with friends,” she explains. “We’d have events every month, then I moved to London and started events here every month.

“Women are always unsatisfied with their wardrobe, they keep spending and they never wear the majority of what they buy. Women spend over £1,000 a year on their wardrobe but don’t wear over 70% of their clothes… There’s [an estimated] £1.6bn of clothes in women’s wardrobes in the UK that they don’t wear but don’t want to throw out. Those are exactly the type of clothes we want to target – the clothes that you like but you don’t wear so much.”

So far the concept has been events-based – 40 to 50 individuals sign up, pay an entrance fee, and bring their clothes to rent or simply turn up to meet and browse. The rental cost is set at 15% of the original retail price (as set by the owner – no-one is asked for an original receipt) for one week’s hire, which averages at £20. Rentez-Vous takes a 20% fee from each hire. But the real money comes from designers. Four or five upcoming designers hire a stall at each event, giving them direct access to customers and a new revenue stream: Rentez-Vous takes a 30% fee and, if renters decide they want to buy it afterwards, a 20% fee again from the sale.

“We are peer-to-peer but we are also about bringing a sustainable solution to fashion professionals,” says Disegni. “The idea is to make this a winning situation for everyone. We don’t want to be competitors to fashion brands, we are recycling their products.

“The core of our proposition is that every time you buy something you have a guilty feeling – you have to rationalise it. For us rental is a way to get access without the guilt. You can get it wrong, you can fall in love, or you can keep – we are not against buying, we are more against waste.” According to WRAP figures (PDF), extending the lifecycle of clothing by just three months reduces the carbon footprint by 8%, water consumption by 10%, and waste by 9%.

The plan now is to move from bijoux events to the online masses.

“Collaborative consumption is online, it’s everywhere,” says Disegni, who indicates there will be postal delivery options for those without the time or desire to meet up. “It was our decision to create a community first – for such a new concept you really need the trust of people… they are now becoming our ambassadors.”

The barriers to scale remain getting the technology and logistics in place – a web developer is working on the site and app, while Disegni is establishing a network of dry cleaners as local drop-off points. A membership subscription is being trialled for designers to have access to the online community. But this is a new concept – clothes rental has always been around, but not peer-to-peer and not in such a nimble, social way.

Disegni admits there is a fear of being “too early for the market”. But two big things work in her favour. One is the potential pent-up demand – even the thinnest slice of the £1.6bn of unused clothes hanging in women’s wardrobes (and it is women that Rentez-vous is initially targeting, though men will be courted later) would be enough to make a sustainable business. The second is the nature of fashion itself – there are arguably fewer sectors which (on paper at least) are better suited to collaborative consumption.

“People are into new, novel things, they are super into this volatility of fashion, and we want to capture that but make it sustainable,” enthuses Disegni.